Context

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The idea for this project came out of a symposium held at York St John University in the summer of 2022. The symposium, named Horrifying Children, concerned, among other things, the often deeply disturbing television and literature aimed at children in the 1970s and 80s and the ways in which they have shaped contemporary popular culture. 

Topics included spectrality in the 1989 BBC Television Series Tom’s Midnight Garden, coming of age in Alan Garner’s The Owl Service and my own contribution, which concerned Cold War fears translated into American sci-fi in the TV series “V”.

One paper that particularly stayed with me was Hollie Adam’s though-provoking exploration of the difficulty in selecting potentially disturbing and traumatic material on the secondary school curriculum. 

This led me, and my co-investigator for this project Dr Adam J. Smith to develop Cold Warnings. As conveyed in the testimonies of a wide range of people now in their middle-age, the sight of the television being wheeled into the classroom was both a source of joy and, as we would come to realise, dread. 

I, like many others, saw the profoundly powerful film Threads not at home, but in the classroom, and this memory has stayed with me since that day. Once remembered, other recollections came flooding back. Not least, Raymond Brigg’s beautiful and terrifying When the Wind Blows; the fascinating and troubling tale of survival terror of Robert Swindell’s Brother in the Land and the hilarious gallows humour of Spitting Image. 

Luckily, we had connections to the remarkable entity that is Scarred for Life. Stephen Brotherstone and David Lawrence, in conjunction with others, produce the series of books, podcasts, live events, and host a website that all delve into the dark side of 1970s and ‘80s British popular culture. Importantly, Scarred for Lifedemonstrates that many of the things that shape our thoughts today came from often throw-away pop-culture artefacts lingering in the memories of what Bob Fisher has described as ‘The Haunted Generation.’ 

Adam and I thought that there may be an interesting intersection of late Cold War culture and the changing nature of the British National Curriculum, introduced in 1986 and examined in 1987 and thereafter. We knew that entertainment had mined the fears of children and that the long running public service Play Safe films (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-JfnhABs9U) lingered in the imagination of many, and we sought to see what part the UK National Curriculum played in the collective memory. 

Ste, Dave and Bob have provided inspiration for this project and feature in both the film we produced and the accompanying website. Scarred for Life put out a call for testimonies among their followers and we received some incredibly funny, intense and moving reflections from those who encountered fears of Armageddon during their school years. 

Whilst discussing this project with Professor Abi Curtis, she completely changed the direction of our efforts by suggesting that we add the thoughts and opinions of the young GCSE students to the mix. This shift from a generational oral history to an intergenerational dialogue raised the ambition and potential of the Cold Warnings project and we owe Abi a great deal of thanks. 

We sought the creative abilities of Grafik Design and Craig Walton to translate the spoken into the visual, and the musical ability of Ian Heald to provide a fitting backdrop for this dialogue. Along with Scarred for Life, our colleagues who run York St John’s Discover YSJ project and Karl Elwell, Alex Colllins and Amanda Brook have been an enormous help in linking us to young people who volunteered to take part in the project focus groups. 

Any attempt to make something creatively vibrant out of peoples’ memories, reflections and opinions is almost entirely reliant on the good-will and thoughtfulness of the participants themselves, and these volunteers are the embodiment of all that is interesting about Cold Warnings, and for this we are eternally grateful.

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The Cold War posed an existential threat to humanity for over four decades. It was a power struggle between the two victorious superpowers that emerged out of the Second World War: The United States of America and the Soviet Union. These two countries – and their respective allies – embodied the rival ideologies of liberal-democratic-capitalism and communism. Consequently, the Cold War was principally about which system provided a better way of life for humanity. Yet, a military – particularly nuclear – arms race underlay this rivalry, leading to a series of dangerous crises that served to further escalate tensions. In the 1950s the Korean War, and then in the 1960s the Cuban Missile Crisis, marked the most dangerous phases of the Cold War when a Third World War appeared to be a very real possibility.

Yet, despite the Cold War continuing, by the late 1960s both Washington and Moscow had come to realise how easily the world could slide into catastrophe. As a result, they sought to lessen tensions and the era of relaxation – known as détente – was born. A high mark was reached in 1972 with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Agreement (SALT I) being signed by the two superpowers in an attempt to freeze the nuclear arms race. Also, the United States entered friendly relations – or rapprochement – with its other Cold War adversary, the People’s Republic of China, for the first time. And a year later the Paris Peace Accords were signed ending the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. Furthermore, in 1979 SALT II was signed. This agreement was intended to bring about the reduction of nuclear arsenals and was meant to represent the pinnacle of détente. 

However, before SALT II could be ratified the Cold War entered its most dangerous phase since the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up the pro-Soviet government in Kabul. This massively escalated Cold War tensions with the United States – under huge pressure following the Iranian Revolution and the taking hostage of the American Embassy staff in Tehran – arming the guerrilla Islamic-fundamentalist mujaheddin. Soviet forces thus became bogged down in a long and bloody conflict seen as Moscow’s Vietnam War. Moreover, in 1980 Ronald Reagan, the neoconservative Republican candidate and former Hollywood B-list actor, won a resounding victory in the United States. Reagan was an ardent Cold Warrior who famously described the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’. He also argued that the United States had fallen behind in the nuclear arms race during détente. 

Reagan, therefore, made it his goal to regain the initiative in the Cold War and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union what he described as the ‘evil empire’. To achieve this goal, he attempted to price the USSR out of the arms race by massively increasing the US defence budget and developing the next generation of nuclear weaponry. As part of this he launched the hugely expensive but wildly unrealistic Strategic Defence Initiative, better known as Star Wars. In addition, Reagan sought to rollback communism by backing anti-Soviet movements in Eastern Europe, including the trade union Solidarity in Poland, and the toppling of leftist governments in the Third World, especially in Latin America. Nonetheless, what caused the greatest tensions was the placement of American nuclear missiles in Western Europe. In response, Moscow’s aging leadership adopted a hard-line position, coming down hard on opposition groups in its satellite states and maintaining its iron grip at home while preparing for the possibility of nuclear Armageddon.

By the mid-1980s the Cold War was thus once again on a knife’s edge. Washington and Moscow realised that one false move could result in global disaster. Even so, 1985 marked a turning point. Reagan had recently been emphatically re-elected giving him unprecedented latitude in terms of his Cold War strategy. And soon after, Mikhail Gorbachev, a young and charismatic politician, was appointed General Secretary of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev understood the dire economic and political situation his country was facing after years of stagnation and wanted to reform communism. As a result, he introduced perestroika – or restructuring – that partially dismantled the command economy and allowed the introduction of some market forces. 

To help these reforms Gorbachev believed it was necessary to cooperate with Washington and end Cold War tensions. This would then allow cuts to the hugely inflated Soviet military budget that simply could not keep up with that of the United States. Thus, despite ongoing friction over many issues, Reagan and Gorbachev entered a series of high-stakes summits at which they sought to convince each other of their good intentions. Crucially, in 1987 Gorbachev agreed to end Moscow’s commitment to the international class struggle and both leaders agreed to the necessity of reducing their nuclear arsenals. Cold War friction, therefore, slowly began to ease and in 1989 Gorbachev pulled Soviet forces out of Afghanistan. In addition, as pro-democracy movements sprung up across Eastern Europe, Gorbachev refused to crush these as his predecessors had done. As a result, just days after the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 both Gorbachev and the new US President, George H. W. Bush, declared the Cold War over.

Few predicted the end of the Cold War and historians have heatedly debated why the decades-long conflict ended so swiftly. Triumphalist scholars have argued that the United States ‘won’ the Cold War by pressuring Moscow to reform. Francis Fukuyama even declared that the end of the Cold War marked the victory of democracy and the ‘end of history’. Others, however, have argued that the end of the Cold War happened by mistake since Gorbachev did not intend his reforms to lead to the weakening and breakup in 1991 of the Soviet Union. Still, others have viewed the end of the Cold War as an inevitability due to structural changes taking place, including the decline of the Soviet economy and the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe and the socialist republics.

Even so, the Cold War never truly ended. The heavy-handed treatment of Russia and the expansion of NATO in the 1990s ensured continued animosity and contributed to the rise of Vladimir Putin determined to recreate the Soviet empire. This tension came to the surface most clearly with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Additionally, the events in Europe in 1989 were not repeated elsewhere. In China that year pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square were brutally crushed. Subsequently, Beijing has become an economic – and increasingly military – superpower and is now Washington’s most dangerous rival. Moreover, the divided Korean peninsula, with an ever-more aggressive and nuclear-armed regime in Pyongyang, remains a very dangerous potential flashpoint. The Cold War, therefore, continues to cast its long shadow over contemporary global politics.

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A harrowing two-hour drama on BBC2, starting at 9.30pm on a Sunday?

It wasn’t obvious TV catnip for the average 1980s youngster, even on an evening when the competition for our attention was less than fierce. BBC1, at the same time, were screening a sixty-minute celebration of George Burns’ eighty-year career in showbusiness. ITV’s regional outposts (or at least some of them) were repeating A Married Man, a 1983 mini-series starring Anthony Hopkins as an adulterous lawyer. Over on Channel 4, there was an hour of Doris Lessing’s Voices, followed by a late-night screening of Max Miller’s 1940 comedy film, Hoots Mon. Throughout 1984, the year that included my twelfth birthday, I kept a meticulous diary detailing the minutiae of my everyday existence in a small North-eastern town. The conclusion of my entry for Sunday 23rd September says it all: “At 9.30 I went to bed”. 

Not that Threads wasn’t high-profile. The cover of that week’s Radio Times had niggled away at me from our front room magazine rack for days: it showed the programme’s rifle-toting, post-apocalyptic traffic warden, his burnt face hidden by a makeshift mask of bandages. And the screening itself attracted 6.9 million viewers, BBC2’s highest audience of the week. But I recall no conversation about Threads at school the following day. No lunchtime analysis of the destruction of Sheffield, not even a guilty snigger at the respectable woman who wets herself in the street: a scene that, in a more accessible corner of the TV schedules, would have kept me and my lavatorially-obsessed classmates chortling for weeks on end.

Nevertheless, by 1984, my friends and I were increasingly concerned about the prospect of a seemingly imminent nuclear strike. Softened up by The Young Ones, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and what seemed like daily news reports about “rising East-West tensions”, I still remember the head-freezing pang of terror instilled by the mournful wail of the end-of-shift siren at the tanning factory on our local riverbank. Hearing it for the first time, while inexplicably messing around with our bikes on the factory’s foul-smelling forecourt, my friend Doug Simpson and I stared at each other with blank, terrified expressions, both too stunned to mutter a conclusion that seemed appallingly obvious: “It’s the four-minute warning”. Every night throughout 1984, I delivered a silent prayer in my bed to a deity with whom I had enjoyed no previous relationship of note. I can still recite it, word-for-word. “Please God, don’t let there ever be a nuclear war. Please let everybody wake up in the morning…” 

But in my school at least, the impact of Threads felt more insidious. Possibly because the effect of Threads on my generation was linked more to our schools themselves than to a TV schedule generously designed to shield us from its trauma. We may not have seen Threads on that initial September 1984 screening, but – over the years that followed – Threads came to us. Since 2018, I have been touring the country as host of Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence’s Scarred For Life show, a theatre production dedicated solely to the discussion of 1970s and ‘80s childhood disquiet. Every performance has included a conversation about Threads, and on each occasion we’ve asked the audience to recount their earliest memories of the programme itself. It may be an unscientific method of sampling, but the answer has been almost ubiquitous: “We watched it at school”. 

Perhaps Threads’ writer, Barry Hines, is to blame. His 1968 novel A Kestrel For A Knave had been a staple of secondary school English syllabuses since the 1970s, and Ken Loach’s 1969 film adaptation, Kes, was certainly shown to my mid-1980s English class, screened from a crackly VHS tape on the wheeled-in “big telly” with the wooden doors. We might not have “taped” Threads ourselves (UK ownership of actual VHS recorders was still only hovering around the 25% mark in 1984) but many well-meaning teachers, it seems, did – and similarly showed it to pupils who, shut into their darkened classrooms, had no option but to sit and be traumatised as nuclear armageddon slowly unfolded before them. Surrounded by their fidgeting peers, there was no possibility of making a cup of tea to escape the excesses of the scariest scenes. Those who saw Threads at school were the very definition of a captive audience. 

I wasn’t one of them. I also skipped the 1985 repeat on BBC1 and the 1987 VHS release, and I finally watched Threadsfor the first time, from DVD, as a fortysomething adult. I immediately felt an overwhelming surge of relief that I hadn’t seen it on BBC2 as an 11-year-old, or even as a teenager in a half-lit Teesside classroom. By late 1984, my concerns about nuclear conflict were bordering on the phobic, and even in 1987 – by which time the Cold War was being miraculously defrosted by the warm breath of Gorbachev’s glasnost – they lingered alarmingly. Tasked by my GCSE English teacher Mr Harrison with writing a short essay entitled ‘What a Stupid Mistake’, my classmates – in the main – turned in tales of teenage folly and peer group embarrassment. My contribution? A grisly description of a nuclear winter, loosed upon the ravaged remains of a post-World War 3 Britain. I still have the essay, scribbled in a battered exercise book: “Cattle lay dead and bloated and people were dead and dying, their bodies riddled with horrific wounds and radiation”. Watching Threads at any point during this period, I suspect, could easily have tipped me over the edge into genuine mental trauma. 

It’s little surprise to me that Threads has become such a touchstone for my generation, even for those of us who went to bed at 9.30pm on Sunday 23rd September 1984. Or, indeed, watched Max Miller’s Hoots Mon on Channel 4. For the children whose formative years were genuinely haunted by the fear of the four-minute warning and fever dreams of mushroom clouds rising above their favourite high streets, Threads has become go-to shorthand for a phobia that has never completely left us. And, as the world events of 2023 take increasingly more alarming turns, we find ourselves once again falling back on the repeated bedtime mantra of my 11-year-old self: “Please God, don’t let there ever be a nuclear war”.